SOMEONE
MAKE THIS INTO A MOVIE PART VII - EMPRESS BY KAREN MILLER

Feel
like investing a large chunk of your life in a nice juicy trilogy of fantasy novels?
If that sounds like the type of thing you do, then check out Empress, the
latest book by Aussie author Karen Miller . . .

Miller scored a hit with her highly regarded Innocent Mage books
recently. “Miller’s prose is earnest and engaging, and her complex story
accelerates nicely toward a brutal cliffhanger finale,” Publishers Weekly
said about The Innocent Mage. “Intriguing characters and a finely
tuned sense of drama,” the Library Journal Review chimed in.

Like her previous novels, Empress forms part of the new brand of
“gritty” and “dark” fantasy subgenre begun by George RR Martin with his
1996 novel A Game of Thrones. So don’t expect any cuddly elves,
fairies and wizards setting off on a quest to find whatever. Empress
is not a book for a book for “the squeamish or soft-hearted” as one
Amazon.com user
put it.

The plot follows the travails of one Hekat. In a family torn apart by
poverty and violence, Hekat is no more than an unwanted mouth to feed,
worth only a few coins from a passing slave trader. But Hekat was not born
to be a slave. For her, a different path has been chosen. It is a path
that will take her from stinking back alleys to the house of her God, from
blood-drenched battlefields to the glittering palaces of Mijak.

“The main character, Hekat, is someone you sympathize with at the
beginning of the story but as the book goes on, you come to realize she is
a sociopath, incapable of sympathizing or loving,” the same Amazon.com
user writes. Despite this (or maybe because of this!) the general
consensus amongst readers is that Empress is a surprisingly good,
must-read fantasy. Blazingly hellish and excellent they all agree.

Will it make a good Hollywood movie? Is Hollywood ready for a “darker”
brand of fantasy that doesn’t deal in moral absolutes like
Lord of the Rings and
Eragon with clear-cut heroes and villains?
Probably not, but you don’t have to wait for Hollywood to bring Miller’s
books to the big screen
—
you can just read them yourself.